Home of the Jewish Nation: London Jews in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination

Eighteenth-century representations of London Jews afford insight into how growing awareness of cultural shifts shaped debates concerning the changing conditions of the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. Discourse about London Jews concentrated on two major and contradictory facets of Jewish life in London: public displays of opulence by more established Jews and the pockets of extreme poverty and instances of criminal behavior that were visible among poorer Jews. Newspaper and diary accounts of Jewish opulence and urban squalor offered both British and North American readers a range of speculative possibilities about the future.